National Model United Nations 2019
The hard work of every delegate in the delegation was recognized when we won the Outstanding Delegation Award at NMUN 2019. Additionally to this, we were able to win several awards for outstanding position papers.
The biggest challenge yet started on March 23rd, when everyone met for a final session of speech training. The delegates had prepared five-minute speeches on the topics of their choice, the most moving one being a recap of the semester everyone had spent together. First tears started to flow, when people realized that this conference would be the end of our experience together. But it was not over yet. On Sunday, after last minute preparations, the opening ceremony officially opened NMUN 2019. At the end of the first day, we came together for debriefing. All committees had started forming alliances, and some delegates overwhelmed by the competitive nature of the negotiations. During the course of the conference however, all delegates managed to assert their positions and to pass draft resolutions containing their ideas.
The opening ceremony could sadly not take place in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations. However, this year, we were able to go to the GA at a different time. Each university was granted the possibility to select a delegate to make a 30 second speech from the podium inside the General Assembly Hall. Of course, our delegation did not only proudly support the delegate we had selected, but also scurried to take as many pictures as possible inside the headquarters of the UN. Other highlights of the conference were the visits to the permanent missions of Indonesia and the European Union. Though we had all acquired substantive knowledge about international relations and Indonesia beforehand, it was a completely different perspective to hear from the experience of diplomats and to ask them questions about the relationship of Germany and Indonesia, both newly elected members on the Security Council.
After many exhausting days, the closing ceremony on March 28th officially closed the last MUN conference we would attend together. To celebrate our success, we went to Brooklyn for sightseeing and some excellent Thai dinner. As is FAUMUN tradition, we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot back to the hotel. More tears flowed on this bridge, when the project management officially announced the end of FAUMUN 18/19, everyone realizing that the intense semester of weekly meetings and intense research sessions with the people they had come to call friends, had come to an end.
– by Dorothee Karbe